I've been using htmx for three years now, and it's completely unlocked new ways of building software for the web, especially if you use a server-side templating language.
But more importantly (as this "Game Boy" option reveals), the head honcho is really responsive with the items in the store. I had purchased a coffee mug a few years back and complained on Twitter that they need to sell larger mugs instead of only offering little tiny baby mugs that only hold ~8 ounces of liquid. The next day, he added giant 48-ounce monsters to the store and I've been drinking out of that mug every day since.
It's been massive for me as well. I would say my web developmemt is best described as dabbling in web development, and I mostly do so for websites that cater to academic interests and conference / society managment and organising. So, relativly niche.
However, I think HTMX is a beauty. Fast, simple, and doesnt come with all the bloat and BS a JS heavy / JS first deployment comes with. I can quikckly build fast and responsive sites that cost visitors very little to use/interact with.
websites have less compatability issues now, load extremely fast (google web speed score from 60-80 to flat 100), and have fewer points of failure. Debugging is a breeze. Websites are no less pretty or useful for it. In fact, they look better now because time otherwise wasted on Js BS is now free to use to tinker with / improve aesthetic, or add new features.
I'm in love with HTMX. It feels like what the web should have always been. There's absolutly zero reason a random website, without my knowledge or consent, should be running extremely heavy compute and analytics on my own device. That should never have been possible/permissible in the first place.
How is htmx ‘just as JS compute heavy’? It’s doing way less than your average SPA. Have you seen the sizes of the JS bundles of popular SPAs? They make htmx look microscopic in comparison.
It doesn’t have its own templating syntax, it just uses server side HTML generation. It doesn’t require the backend to ‘conform’ to anything, it works with very standard HTTP forms and HTML responses. I’m afraid you’re very confused!
> I've been using htmx for three years now, and it's completely unlocked new ways of building software for the web, especially if you use a server-side templating language.
Likewise. 3 or 4 years ago, I ripped out two-thirds of all the JS in my B2B SaaS by using htmx with server-side templating. So much simpler.
The ethos of allowing a return to a simpler way of building a web app resonates with me.
This should be the way. For some reason, over time, it became harder and harder to build web apps. Tech should be about making things easier though. I don't know where we went wrong.
I don't agree.
JavaScript was definitly not fine when it started and because of it, people had to create multiple libraries and framework to go around differences in web-browsers. They got used to libraries and big framework as they really were necessary first. Now that JavaScript is pretty good, they are still used to frameworks and libraries which are very often unnecessary.
> it's completely unlocked new ways of building software for the web, especially if you use a server-side templating language.
Could you please expand on this point. As a “greybeard” web dev from the 2000’s era, I’d like to understand if your “unlocking” is my “that’s how it originally worked, get of my lawn”?
I have the same question. It seems like a decent amount of posters here don't require (non-standard) interactivity. Plain HTML+CSS (perhaps via static site generators) would work.
It made me think about the Javascript present on my blog. The site works fine without JS (syntax high-lighting is pre-baked server-side).
There is some optional JS enhancement:
- MathJax is used for turning LaTeX expressions into nice graphics on the client-side. A search reveals this could be done on the server-side, but I'd need to deal with the node.js ecosystem.
- PJAX is enabled [1]. This is completely optional, but it noticeably made page navigation faster (feel instant), especially when navigating between pages already visited (forwards/backwards).
UPDATE: Reading https://triptychproject.org/, it seems like what PJAX does is item #3: "Partial page replacement"
Yes - how you likely built websites in 2000's era (possibly with Classic ASP or PHP4 .. maybe Perl?) is the sort of websites we are addressing with HTMX.
It's bringing us back to that sort of web development but with modern tools and technology.
For the server side, we can use modern languages with better templating for html.
For the client, with htmx, you can do a lot of javascript such as ajax calls (load, trigger, etc) without writing javascript. With htmx you specify what you want to do inside html attributes.
So my actual javascript code ends up minimal.
I have been doing website dev since 2008. I've worked with PHP, C# (WebForms, MVC), a bit of python... not to mention maintaining an old website in Classic ASP.
2008-2010 I used C# WebForms. I didn't like it, but we still kept it simple, returning data from server side to html.
2010 I started to enjoy jQuery and saw potential returning data. Opened the door to provide more options for webdev.
Around 2014, I've started disagreeing with "modern website development" learning knockoutjs, requirejs, to eventually angularjs, npm's, etc. Sure, I learned and pushed forward but websites seemed to become more a chore and bloat overtime. Personally, I've not really invested in React.
I was starting to go round full circle to the 'old ways' just with modern tech. To me, htmx just makes webdev even more smoother.
Likewise, I started using HTMX with AWS Step Functions as the backend and it’s been difficult but also a joy. Sfn these days makes for a weird and wild text templating engine. I’ve been thinking about working on DSL overlay to smooth the bumps a bit.
That is not a use cases I would've expected Step Functions to handle; I'm intrigued. You're using express ones, I assume, but how are you wiring them up and why?
API Gateway direct integration to Step Functions. Unlike Lambda, there is not automatic transform for requests so I just wrote one and copy/paste it to each method integration (via a preprocess script; one of the ugly bits). Yes, EXPRESS state machines. I’ve found they have better tail latency behavior, and of course they involve zero patching/dependency updates which is nice.
The state machines use JSONata for the sweet, sweet power vs JSONPath. Generally I have a Parallel state that splits the different parts of the page and Map states for data driven repetition (usually some data pulled from DDB). I have a simple JSONata method for replacing placeholder values (aka data binding). Zero Lambda at the cost of come copy paste.
Thanks for replying, that's an interesting architecture. The idea of using a high-up parallel state seems particularly neat as a way to ensure every part of the page render stays independent, and to burst up the compute serving the response.
Right. People look at me funny for drinking my tea from a 500 ml thermal mug, courtesy of USS Defiant replicators, and it's not because of the Starfleet delta on it (people don't even recognize it, philistines).
1.25 liters is way beyond even my own addiction to lightweight liquid stimulants.
This implies it's all dropshipped print-on-demand, of course. Which is fine if you're just considering it a donation incentive rather than a worthwhile product in its own right.
Yes, but you might guess they've done some work to find a supplier and test the quality of their supplied products and have a box of T-shirts they know are good. Which they don't - they're basically just plugging your order into a slop fulfilment company. Which is fine if you don't actually care too much about the merch.
In 2026, everything is server side. Serve your DOM updates encoded in JSON if you want. Personally, I find serving them in HTML to be less of a hassle.
I mean a radically different view is that the SERVER should just give you the data and process your requests, without necessarily caring much about what you are - a browser or some other automated system, or a desktop client, where each has vastly different preferences on how the content might get displayed or used.
With that approach, a clear API in the middle and a SPA on the client side makes a bunch of sense (as long as you don't make some chimera of hydration and pre-rendering and server-side components while pretending that it's still a SPA and it "just works" while your server is coupled to the client).
Of course, what you actually need depends on your circumstances and sometimes even preferences. For a bunch of internal or personal stuff, SSR can be really nice and simple!
You're correct that it's a matter of the developer's view, or philosophy. The issue I have with "just give you the data" is that requires the server to encode the raw data somehow, most often JSON, send it down the wire just to have the client un-encode it, store it, and populate HTML elements with it. Meanwhile server-based templating is exceptionally lightweight and fast (especially when compiled) and so converting the raw data directly to HTML on the server via templates tends to be faster and lighter and cleaner, as "state" (not counting ephemeral or stylistic attributes) is maintained in a single place.
You make a good point that different clients may represent the data differently, although again that's easy to handle on the server by using a header or other identifier of the client, and using the appropriate template.
There isnt a definitive right or wrong, both approaches can work but the reason HTMX has found a following is that lots of developers are tired of the complications and difficulties that SPA frameworks seem to introduce, and reverting back to a server-based philosophy is allowing them to be more productive.
As someone who struggled with the downright problematic lifecycle of complex JSF/PrimeFaces apps and now is in a year-long-with-no-end-in-sight migration to a SPA, I will say that the SPA wins out in quite a few development/maintenance/convenience facets, second order system effect or not. As with all migrations, it's slower than you'd expect but the pace of creating new stuff is far more promising (especially if you fight off pixel pushers) and the experience of maintaining SPAs has been good in other projects, especially given that the old JSF/PrimeFaces setup has been around for like a decade (and performed poorly throughout that time, with plenty of footguns that a wide roster of developers kept tripping over).
On the other hand, I will completely admit that SPA can bring additional complexity (especially if you end up with one of those needlessly complex solutions like Next.js or Vuex, when all you need is under 100 components across maybe a number of views on the same order of magnitude), but one also has to consider that some of the traditionally SSR solutions eventually strive to have more reactivity and often create mechanisms for partial updates, except across the board they end up being harder to debug and customize compared to some JS/TS calling a vaguely RESTful API over HTTP(S).
I unironically liked it way more when "web app" meant some PHP returning pages with forms and some Bootstrap on top, even some light jQuery (but we all know how badly the "light" bit held up).
HTMX's whole vibe is amazing. It's good tech, kept simple, useful in gobs of situations, but doesn't take itself too seriously. I've used it in professional and side projects since intercooler.js, and still love it. Here's a crazy unicorn-laser-eyes mug[0] that evokes the vibes of NROL-39[1]. I adore it.
The nrol 39 mission patch is one of my favorites. You should find the authorizing docs for that patch and read the hand written notes. They're hilarious.
I personally find react overly engineered for my projects - vuejs (+quasar on top) is just great. Granted a little boring perhaps, but it just works, behaves as you'd expect, and doing anything just isn't that difficult.
I've just found having TSX on the server and TSX on the client to be a fairly trusty abstraction, and also typesafe way to update the DOM.
The thing that is frustrating me about HTMX so far is: How do I build typesafe templates on the server? I'm trying out Aksama and it seems ok, is there something similar for JS?
Also the SPA abstraction of "your website is just a client that connects to a an API" is nice.
Can likewise mirror the support for quasar, always the first framework I reach for when starting a new project. The amount of stuff you get for free in terms of setup and content is insane.
v4 is in beta and the source has some skills files. And for me personally I'm slowly building my own rules, like not having dialogs live hidden in the main page; instead, every button that triggers a dialog should do so via an htmx call that returns a dialog and appends it to the body. And then setting rules for how Claude should write templates, leveraging Django's new partialdef feature.
react based shit lost the plot so hard. i've used it quite a bit, with other beefy but impressive js libs like aggrid and stuff. i'm just tired of client-browser overwork in general that feels like such a mess. having so much of a webapps logic live in the front end feels completely preposterous to me these days. we've only ever needed front end to just.. be the front end. look nice, provide the interface, give people things to click. i very enjoy having all of the behavior determined and defined from the back next to all the code that brings in the data. feels so much more like writing good software.
with that im very enjoying the challenge of scaling ssr stuff like this. i am very tempted to throw months of my life away building out a full fledged framework that means no npm / node toolchains, an easier to customize component model thats more performant and doesn't feel like... abstractions of abstractions, compile time tree shakedowns. for all of it. streamlit showed me the beauty of a declarative api that kinda went and did the rest but it missed a ton of marks with its top to bottom runs and it's just awkward.. a little too opinionated, terrible performance, perhaps the dumbest state management ive ever seen in my life... nicegui improved on that, but python just doesn't fit the bill for what i want to do. something that's go and its fully reactive and gives you full control. i genuinely think the hardest part of doing this is designing a framework api that is approachable and easily-rememberable. golang actually makes this hard, python wins with kwargs and stuff. i also suppose i could just start using wasm
i think where this might all be headed.. it's a touchy subject if im being honest. our guy at work is an amazing person super candid and honest. he says it kinda hurts seeing the front end stack he's been in pretty much his entire career start to lose developer interest. we've talked in depth about how the entire history of things like react came to be out of necessity, a product of its time with all the historic constraints that used to exist.. it led to educational curriculums, bootcamps and full blown careers.. but it's really hard to get behind what feels like an overly complex workaround that spans well over a decade at this point. people have invested a lot in their frontend-frameworks and toolchains and workflows and other pieces of knowledge and understandably are ready to defend it the entire existence of "make the client browser do a lot of work work" model. but hey, I've used both heavily and for what it's worth I think server-side and a general programming language are really the path forward here and it feels like something that corrects one of computing histories biggest weird sidequests. i genuinely think everyone will have a deeper and better understanding of computing in general approaching from this angle, and i think ssr is a very valuable path to explore that can really open the doors to understanding what makes good software as you're forced to contend with the most important design pattern: if you're going to make the server do most of the work, what is needed to do it well & scale to many clients. it naturally leads you into some really exciting possibilities. i personally love where this is headed because it completely nerfs the need for such abominations such as graphql & it's supporting infra. i can just rawdog sql, the most goated query language of all time.
highly performant data grids imo are the gold standard of components. i'm okay with a blend of client and server side work to make this a reality, aggrid is a good example of a very sick front end lib that does this. but i look forward to seeing if anyone's going to do something new here that is performant as hell and served up from the backend, some kind of tanstack demonchild or satanic wasm data grid 9000
I was at Big Sky Dev Con when they unveiled the GameBoy game. I kid you not my jaw dropped. I thought it was some sort of like emulator gimmick until they said "everyone can take a physical cartridge home!"
One of the most delightful little swag stunts I've ever seen, and emblematic of the HTMX crew just how much they care about craft and delight in everything they do.
I love HTMX and use it in a few projects, but its amusing how whats old is new again. .NET Framework / Web Forms had update panels to do partial rendering of web pages back in 2005. Outside of .NET developers it got a lot of hate. But to a certain extent HTMX is a super well refined and more capable version of update panels and more.
And even that was even taking on the solution from c#'s daddy : Delphi IntraWeb suite, all the way back in Delphi 7 and after.
This whole concept died because of styling and that era of everyone having their pixel perfect psd turned into a html table or a flash applet and you couldn't reconcile both, but sometime out there you can still find an old IntraWeb business app and you realize they had the components, events and everything figured out long before it became cool again.
I always wish for some RAD tool to show up for modern web stack again, but I guess it moves too fast to be worth it, and nowadays front and backend are properly separated disciplines.
Coming from asp.net originally as well, my mental model of HTMX is “UpdatePanel that always works”. Asp.net AJAX lib was an interesting take at the time but my gosh was it hella complicated once you ventured past UpdatePanel.
Even though it’s basically dead tech I can’t bear to throw out my Apress book about it. :)
After developing react, angular, Vue frontends for a decade, going back to good old plain server side rendered ruby, elixir, hell even php just feels right.
Especially nowadays where AI changes how you interact with ugly languages like php, but benefit from their deep ecosystems, speed and super fast "build" times.
In fact, despite me being unable to look at php syntax much without vomiting, and finding languages without proper static types nauseating..I'm just more productive in those than in spa slop land.
The web and browser technologies has also moved a lot. The "client side rendering so users don't see a refresh and have an app like experience" is basically a 2010 thing.
I just like being able to pick up old projects that i avoided for ages, and being able to pull in HTMX and make it a bit more modern without rewriting in react/vue etc. And it feels like a modern app, not a 90s app.
HTMX is awesome. I've replaced several OSS web apps on my home server with HTMX + Go + PostgreSQL replacements. The results are lightweight, responsive, work great on desktop and mobile alike, all with the absolute minimum complexity required. The codebases are easy to understand and modify, and so far I'm going months between updates (mostly just minor bugfixes for my applications). I fully expec my mature apps will go years if not decades between required upgrades.
Are any of these open source? I've gone down the go/htmx/pg path lightly a few times and I haven't loved the feel of it, but maybe I'm doing it wrong. I think just server side templating just starts feeling icky in go so maybe I'm just missing a good pattern or library.
- Standard library http package for the API server implementation
- Standard library template/html package for generating the dynamic parts of the webpage content
- Static web content is embedded within the Go binary (https://pkg.go.dev/embed) and served through server routes
- api served from /api route, htmx webpage served from /
- no ORM, mostly using standard library database/sql package for DB transactions, maybe reaching for a query builder library for more complex queries like complex search functionality
- Local S3 compatible object store for dynamic binary data like user-uploaded images and video. Local filesystem can be fine for small scale stuff.
For my home server I have authn/authz happening at the OS/infra layer, but if you need multitenancy you can pretty easily integrate an OAuth/OpenID authn/authz middleware for login with Google or whatever.
I'm replacing existing third-party applications which have complex JavaScript frameworks with my "in house" apps using HTMX + mostly just HTML+CSS for most pages and functionality. i.e. I'm not introducing a layer, I'm replacing one.
Why not just use html without HTMX you ask? With HTMX I don't have to reload the entire page to navigate, which is especially helpful for making the app responsive even on low bandwidth connections like a bad cell signal.
Sorry, I don't follow? I'm just using the templating from Go's standard library. That part replaces existing server-side components of the old applications.
That's great but I believe it's still over-engineered. Unless it's a web site that can tolerate no downtime at all during schema updates, SQLite in WAL2 mode is more than enough. Moreover, in Postgres version upgrades can't be done without significant downtime (or setting up replication and performing a complex dance), so even that isn't so cut and dry.
For some of the simpler sites sqlite would have been fine, but I do need Postgres anyway for some other stuff on my server so the overall burden of standardizing on Postgres only is less than having to do tuning for two different databases. In particular sqlite has worse defaults due to backwards compatibility, so you have to do a lot of upfront config for every table and DB.
Postgres version upgrades are basically painless, at my workplace our upgrades complete in so little time our users don't notice, and we have more data than probably 99.9999% of companies out there (mature company in aerospace industry).
Well if you already have Postgres then yes, sounds fine. I don't really agree that SQLite needs tons of tweaking -- setting journal_mode to WAL/WAL2 is the only real thing worth doing, everything else I would consider optional.
Version upgrades for SQLite are basically a no-op though, that's kinda one of the reasons why it's so great to run in production (and deployment a maintenance being mostly a no-op as well, apart from setting up backups I guess).
I don't actually suggest that everyone should run their production on SQLite, but it's genuinely worth considering especially for small-ish projects.
Foreign key constraints, sync frequency, busy timeout, strict typing on tables, explicit types for integer primary keys, and a convention for storing dates and times are others I would want to do up front.
I personally find Postgres WAY easier than SQLite simply because of the deployment story. I do a lot of hotfixes and dangerous stuff on personal projects, and having two databases complicates that tremendously. I like being able to run hot code on prod.
For the record, this is not the same reason I like postgres for actual production code
I think they mean that they actually do need Postgres for some of their projects, and it's easier to just use Postgres for everything, than to use Postgres for some things and SQLite for others.
Yeah, I mean I guess I could technically connect to the remote SQLite server on my production server. You're right. But I've never done that and that's just not the pattern people use on SQLite
> Unless it's a web site that can tolerate no downtime at all during schema updates, SQLite in WAL2 mode is more than enough.
I do think that people really underestimate how quickly a system starts being "please, no downtime" (or its weaker cousin, "please, don't make your ops people do rollouts at 1AM").
Like obviously it's not the end of the world but the default assumption of "the system is up" makes a loooooot of things downstream of that easier.
Having to do operational bug triage on systems that routinely have blips in availability is unfun.
Trying to have so few blips they're invisible to bug tracking is a very expensive level of uptime. It takes a lot of convenience to add up that high, compared to ignoring errors for thirty seconds at noon.
The sort of real thing is that it's not just about no-downtime deploys, but also stuff like rolling back smoothly, general continuous deployment or even just generally being able to easily move between versions.
I still think there are lines (I have to begrudgingly accept that downtime for PG upgrades is still basically worth it because the effort to not downtime there is so high but the frequency is so low), and it's a spectrum. But I've found that this particular flavor of tech debt tends to hurt quite a lot even with fairly low activity systems
Thank you to the HTMX-folks for keeping software fun! I've been a happy HTMX user and Grug essay forwarder since it first made the rounds here on HN. This was an instant purchase :)
What I don't like about Htmx is, that it is still a JS framework, without good automatic fallbacks for a noscript situation. This leads to web devs thinking it would be great to do all the things in Htmx, even if all they have is a static page with static content.
Just recently I looked at hosting an old school forum. I don't want to load all the PHP and MySQL baggage on my server or even run it in docker, so I looked for Python solutions. Found PunkwebBB. Was happy for a short time with it, until I tested it more in depth with no scripts. Unfortunately, while it has some good fallbacks in some places, it doesn't have them everywhere and some buttons just don't do anything without JS. It also uses Htmx. Completely unnecessary JS, considering the function of the buttons.
I considered forking it. But the amount of work to remove the needless JS, and repair it ...
So now I am building my own forum completely without JS, and with Python Django doing a lot of heavy lifting.
It's too bad Htmx isn't just the native behavior of HTML, implemented in a cross-platform standard, that does not need to rely on Javascript in user space code. It could just be part of the browser. It should have been part of the browser.
It's awesome, I'm not criticizing Htmx at all to be clear, I am criticizing our seemingly inability to advance the core web technology of HTML in browsers to include this kind of tech natively.
If somebody from the WhatWG, e.g. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Opera, and Mozilla, etc. wants to embrace and support the creators of Htmx and wrap this into the browser natively, I will proudly retract my comment.
This seems like a strange combination of proposals:
1) PUT, PATCH, and DELETE methods: Logical and obvious extension, no extra syntax, but easy to get around today by just using POST for everything.
2) Buttons actions without forms: Just syntax nicety to avoid a single form tag, unconsequential and just adds implementation complexity.
3) Partial page replacement: Would completely revolutionize js-free html capabilities, but the draft is unfinished..
It would seem to me that the author should have just made the thrid proposal, and not wrapped it in a project of two much less consequential proposals?
Yep, you're right [1] - and the author is posting in here I believe, if he sees this - I just have to say, thank you for all you've done... maybe someday the browsers, WhatWG etc. will catch up with you...
> So now I am building my own forum completely without JS, and with Python Django doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Later this year I will be releasing Misago 0.40, which is a near complete rewrite from React.js to HTMX, with rest of features to follow in 2027. And yes, noscripy support is part of it.
PunkwebBB maintainer here. This is good feedback. The only thing that really does need HTMX/JS on PunkwebBB is the shoutbox polling, which you can opt out of anyway. But you're right that there should be non JS fallbacks in place of modals and other small htmx interactions. I'll get on this.
I haven't published a release yet, I removed HTMX from thread/post actions and deleting categories/subcategories. The shoutbox is now the only functionality that won't work when JS is disabled. I've improved the fallback of the thread/post editor when JS is disabled as well. Those changes are in the main branch now.
Indeed. And the amusing/disappointing/frustrating thing is: my next.js site works if you turn off JS. Links are server-rendered as links, HTML is server-rendered as HTML. If you visit one of the tools that run on the client then they won't work, but the pages that could be static content? They're static content.
Or at least they were, until I started using cache components the other week, and I'd not noticed they'd regressed. That's frustrating. Give me a few minutes...
I get the point but I do feel like Htmx's whole design is a big automatic fallback... If some browsers will never be able to understand the hx-get/post/etc attribs, you can just design the initial html you send over around that.
while what you're saying is true in theory, you still have to make sure that e.g. your form responses do the right thing. You might think "just return the full page!" but it's extra work that for many people is busywork, and makes it harder to reuse things ("my comment post endpoint returns the rendered comment" becomes "my comment post endpoint needs to know what page the comment is in to return the fully rendered page")
In practice I think it's very easy to make your htmx application JS-requiring.
Your comment post endpoint already knows what page the comment is in, it’s in whatever page the ‘post a comment’ form is in. When we design apps in a way that respects the conventions of REST (hypermedia and resource-oriented design), htmx slots in perfectly.
I have learned that whenever anything is "X if Y" it means it is really weak at X and "if Y" is just a workaround. This has saved me a lot of grief in life by identifying my personal emotional attachment to things.
That’s great, but unless you know some secret perfect technology that the rest of us don’t, every tech you use is also full of these workarounds, you just ignore them because you like the tech.
Also, hx-boost isn’t really a workaround, it’s a fully supported and documented feature.
Turbo comes from a progressive-enhancement philosophy: start with proper HTML and add richer behaviour on top. HTMX is a JavaScript library in much the same sense that React is. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but it makes this anti-pattern easier to fall into.
Honestly, “the site should work without JavaScript” is no longer the strongest argument. Server-rendered, semantic HTML matters more for accessibility, SEO, and increasingly for LLMs and other automated tools.
Of course, you can write excellent HTML with HTMX. It just requires more discipline—or enough experience to recognize when you are quietly building a JavaScript application in HTML attributes.
While I am not particularly a fan of HTMX, I do absolutely adore how Carson and the team always have such a great sense of humor with the project.
I used HTMX in a few projects, and the library worked well enough for what I needed, but I found it to be a bit too limiting compared to accomplishing the same task in Vanilla JS (my go-to).
hello all, we are releasing htmx 4.0 on the Game Boy and Gameboy Color (thank you rcy for submitting)
it is a real, honest-to-goodness mario-bros inspired GameBoy game with four levels over three biomes ending in a slop factory where you battle final boss warren buffering (an online character I beef with, we are friends)
if you beat him it unlocks the source code for htmx 4.0
game was written by Stephen Mitchell (aka scum) by hand, using GBStudio w/heavy customizations, hoping to get an essay by him up soon talking about the creation of the game
Oh hey, I made GB Studio, really cool to see it being used for this :) I've got some nice features in progress for the next version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8UKwV1gJAI
Did you use the built in GB studio sound engine? If so that's my code :) Always enjoyable when it pops up in places like this. Looks like a fun project.
Is it a real physical cartridge? How do you get the source code off the cartridge at the end? Or does it give you a passcode to a git repo or…like an NFT with access to the source?
The Chromatic is an awesome experience to play. The HTMX 4 game has an auto-loader which immediately drops you into the game at your last checkpoint. Since the Chromatic has no boot screen, you're back in play within a second of powering on the system.
I'll also say - scum gave a presentation which was actually very touching. "Love what you do, care deeply about your projects, be with your family". Combined with everything you already said - pretty awesome stuff
I made the switch to HTMX recently After 12+ years of building web apps with Javascript and its been nice. I always hated the build complexity of modern Javascript, so much tooling, dependencies and packages to get basic functionality.
I’m amazed at how cheap this is. How is this possible for what I’m assuming is a relatively low-volume physical product? I don’t suppose it’s produced on-demand, but also Carson Gross probably doesn’t have 1000 of these boxes at his home, or I would have seen the pics on twitter.
That’s my doing. I already had a pipeline of contacts for manufacturing GameBoy games at various levels of quality and cost. Being involved from the beginning, I was able to influence development to ensure we could produce the lowest cost product that met the quality levels needed to blow up everyone’s collective minds.
In the pre agentic coding era, I was hyped about HTMX for providing a classic way of web development over React. But after not writing code for several months, all work done by claude code / codex, I find myself not caring whether the framework is HTMX or React anymore. I mean, why do you bother if you don't write the code yourself. And I'm even starting to feel React's advantages: good ecosystem, rich UI kits, reusable components… these are all where HTMX falls short. I'm surprised to see most people in this thread didn't mention any of these.
I can understand that feeling, but remember that just because you have been handed a new powertool you mustn't always use it. Life is not about optimizing everything. It makes redundant work faster, where you fully understand from the outset how to write something, but this just frees you up to learn and explore new things, and work on stuff just for the fun of it, like this.
Agreed that life is not about optimizing everything. I do enjoy writing code by hand when the framework or language is delightful to work with， it's just that HTMX isn't that choice for me. The h-attributes model doesn't fit the way I think. Also, my original point was more that once agents write most of the code, "delightful to hand-write" stops being the main criteria for picking a framework.
I don't see a relation in this. You can both use LLMs and care about your codebase design. Frameworks and libraries are still relevant, and each one has its tradeoffs.
While I prefer to stay with an approach of using web components for my current work, HTMX seems like a good option to consider for future work.
I think the design of HTMX acts as a complexity limiter by encouraging less JS. One can make the argument that manually writing JS instead of HTMX would be easier and more maintainable. However, I've found that JS code often trends towards becoming increasingly complex over time.
Also, I'm glad to see that htmx can be installed without npm. I think the ability to install npm packages can incentivize too many dependencies.
Love to see new stuff on ancient platforms. Surprised I couldn't find a post about Micro Mages on HN, only comments. https://youtu.be/ZWQ0591PAxM
Spoiler, when the time will come you'll never see something like this on the play station 4.
- It's way too long and not catchy. What it refers to is a convoluted long thing too.
- This is the killer: it's not so mainstream that everybody knows it. People kind of took "REST" and left the rest. Even REST isn't usually real REST in practice. It just means json api nowadays.
But more importantly (as this "Game Boy" option reveals), the head honcho is really responsive with the items in the store. I had purchased a coffee mug a few years back and complained on Twitter that they need to sell larger mugs instead of only offering little tiny baby mugs that only hold ~8 ounces of liquid. The next day, he added giant 48-ounce monsters to the store and I've been drinking out of that mug every day since.